Entries Posted in OIG

Sometimes it can be confusing to keep track of who does what in this postal world. The U.S. Postal Service has a wide range of stakeholders, including a few entities with oversight responsibilities. We, the Office of Inspector General (OIG), are one of those entities.

The OIG, an independent agency within the Postal Service, maintains the integrity and accountability of America’s postal service, its revenue and assets, and its employees. Our mission is to help maintain confidence in the postal system and improve the Postal Service’s bottom line through independent audits, investigations, and research. Audits of postal programs and operations help to determine whether they are efficient and cost effective. Investigations help prevent and detect fraud, theft, and misconduct, and deter postal crimes. The OIG also conducts research to keep Postal Service Governors, Congress, Postal Service management, and other stakeholders informed of challenges and opportunities.

Every 6 months, as required by Congress, we publish a report of our work and activities for that period. We recently published our spring Semiannual Report to Congress, or the SARC as we affectionately call it. Our efforts focused on identifying ways to make the Postal Service more efficient, reduce its strategic and financial risk, and lower its cost of doing business. Among the reports featured in this semiannual report are audits on revenue protection and Sunday delivery of parcels; a management advisory on city carrier compensation costs; and white papers on a wide range of topics, including the Postal Service’s universal service obligation.

During this period, we issued 74 audit reports, management advisories, and white papers. We completed 1,955 investigations that led to 370 arrests and nearly $1.4 billion in fines, restitutions, and recoveries, $10.7 million of which was turned over to the Postal Service.

The report also carries extensive appendices chronicling our work in detail. We encourage you to review the report and get to know us better. We welcome your input as well.

If you’ve rummaged around our website lately, you may have noticed a new tab on our home page entitled Audit Asks. “What is Audit Asks?” you might ask. It’s where you can read about some of our upcoming audits in their early stages and respond to questions that can help us develop more complete and useful audit reports.

Audit Asks is actually an update of our audit project pages, initially launched about 6 years ago to get feedback from our readers. With the new Audit Asks format, we have added some eye-catching graphics and changed our writing style to prompt more feedback.

Engaging stakeholders is important to us, as this blog attests. Your comments provide valuable insights and can help guide the direction of our audits, as well as our findings. This is also your opportunity to send links to documents you think will be useful during the audit planning phase. During this phase the audit team learns about the subject, collects a broad range of data, contacts key experts and stakeholders, and develops the specific objectives of the audit. This is when we decide on the breadth and depth of the topic of the report.

Are you following us on Twitter and Facebook? It’s a great way to be informed when the audit announcements are posted in Audit Asks.

And while we’re asking, are there specific issues you believe merit a U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General audit? We conduct objective, independent audits of Postal Service programs and operations to prevent and detect fraud, waste, and misconduct, and to promote economy, efficiency, and effectiveness. If you have an idea for an audit along any of these lines, we would love to hear from you.

The year 2014 was certainly historic on the postal and logistics front. Alibaba entered the U.S. market with a bang, setting a record with the largest ever U.S. initial public offering. For the first time ever, non-mail revenues exceeded mail revenues for postal administrations around the world. Shippers braced for the full effect of dimensional weight pricing. And the U.S. Postal Service added its name to the growing list of agencies and companies to suffer a data breach.

All in all, quite an eventful year. OIG staff sifted through the news and put together a top 10 list of postal stories, in reverse order of impact. Share your thoughts and take our poll to vote for your top story.

10. Staples Taps Out – Under pressure from labor groups, Staples and the Postal Service ended a pilot program to set up mini-post offices in stores. Instead, the 82 Staples pilot locations transitioned into the Postal Service’s long-established Approved Shipper Program, which offers some postal products alongside those of other carriers.

9. Open Sesame! – China’s biggest e-commerce company Alibaba set a record for the largest U.S. initial public offering ever, raising $25 billion. Alibaba’s CEO said the company plans “aggressive expansion” in the U.S. With any luck, the Postal Service will figure out how to partner with Alibaba too.

8. Dim Weighting on Shippers – FedEx and UPS announced plans to price all ground parcels based on how much space they take up during transport, a concept known as dimensional weight, or dim weight, pricing. Analysts predict this change will result in the most dramatic rate-spike for shippers in decades. Meanwhile, the Postal Service bucked the trend and lowered most commercial Priority Mail prices in 2014, a move aimed at gaining commercial customers.

7. A Capital Idea – For the first time in years, the Postal Service has funds to invest in capital projects. Helped by the exigent price increase in January 2014, the Postal Service ended the fiscal year with $1.4 billion in “controllable” income and said it has about $2 billion for capital investment.

6. Postal Banking Gets Fresh Look – A raft of media coverage of an OIG paper on postal financial services energizes a lively public policy debate, including a slew of conferences, and puts the idea of postal banking on the menu of possible reforms.

5. Invasion of the Last Mile – Last mile delivery has gotten crowded with retail giants, such as Walmart and Nordstrom, trying their hands at same-day delivery and/or experimenting with crowdshipping. And smaller players are providing niche delivery services, such as Peapod for grocery delivery or Deliv that shuttles goods from shopping malls to customers.

4. Amazon Eyes World Domination – The giant e-commerce provider is moving into all aspects of the supply chain and beyond, opening warehouses and distribution centers, offering same-day delivery, testing drones, using bikes, providing cloud services, and after-sales support services. Amazon is also a valuable partner of the Postal Service, collaborating on Sunday delivery and the new grocery delivery test.

3. New Champion of the World – Non-mail revenues now exceed mail revenues for postal organizations around the world, according to Accenture’s annual report on high-performing posts. This shift indicates how important parcels and other diversified products - representing 52 percent of posts' total revenues - have become to posts.

2. Madame Postmaster General – Postal Service Chief Operating Officer Megan Brennan is named to succeed retiring Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. Brennan will be the first female PMG in the Postal Service’s 240-year history.

1. Hack Attack – The Postal Service joins the growing list of government agencies and corporations to experience a data breach and the repercussions that come with it, including a congressional hearing, customer and employee concern, and some corporate soul-searching. There were almost 61,000 cyber attacks and security breaches across the entire federal government last year, according to a recent White House report.

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